An MMS is a brand-new messaging service capable of transmitting multimedia contents between mobile phones or between a mobile phone and an E-mail server or other terminals. Compared with a short message service in a text form, the MMS is advantaged in its capability of providing a user with multimedia messages such as image and voice.
In related technologies, the maximum size of contents of one short message is 140 bytes, the storage and management of the messages can be typically realized by a commercial database, and based on IO performance of an existing disc array, thousands of short messages can be processed every second. The size of one multimedia message is generally about 100 Kbytes, and existing protocol standards for a multimedia messaging service have made no limitation to the size of a multimedia message, thus, the size of the contents of a multimedia message may become larger and larger with the improvement in the capability of a terminal. Being a non-real-time service, an MMS is typically processed in the following way: a submitted multimedia message is received by a receiving service and processing unit of an MMS Center (MMSC) and stored in an MMS storage server, and then forwarded to a receiving terminal.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram illustrating the MMS message reading and writing of an MMS processor in related technologies, as shown in FIG. 1, an MMS processor processes a received MMS message and directly writes the processed MMS message into a physical disc via a write interface and reads the MMS message via a read interface. Specifically, an MMSC may realize an MMS server with a Network Addition Storage (NAS) device and a Storage Area Network (SAN) device. The MMS server carries out a message sent from a receiving and processing unit and stores a multimedia message (e.g. a multimedia messaging service) in its storage unit in the form of a file, stores the index of the multimedia message in a database as user data and completes the reading, the writing and the deletion of the multimedia message.
However, no matter how an MMS storage server is realized, its IO performance is always limited for the following two reasons: the limitation in the performance of a disc: the maximum rotation speed of a disc is 15000 rpm at present, leading to a physical limitation to the IO performance of the MMS storage server; and the economic factor: the use of a storage server of a high IO performance means an increase in cost.
Many unpredictable consequences will be caused if the processing performance of the MMSC exceeds the limit of the IO performance of a storage server during a multimedia message processing. In order to make an MMSC system run stably, it is necessary to conduct a traffic control on the messages entering the MMSC, which will lead undoubtedly to degradation in the performance of the system. However, if an advanced storage device is used to improve the IO performance of a storage server, the cost will be increased.
For instance, the mobile newspaper service that has been currently provided by China Mobile has changed the circulation manner of conventional newspaper by directly sending contents of a piece of newspaper to the mobile phone of a user in a multimedia message form, this new newspaper circulation method is convenient and efficient and saves labor cost, however, as shown in FIG. 2 which is a schematic diagram illustrating the variation of the traffic of an MMSC with time in related technologies, the sending of multimedia messages (mobile morning paper and mobile evening paper) in a concentrated period (e.g. 8:00 AM or 19:00 PM) causes an MMS processing system a traffic impact, which is typically of pulse type.
If the pulse-type traffic impact exceeds the IO performance of the MMS storage server, messages in the MMSC system will be jammed or a downtime will be caused, and the degradation in the processing performance of the MMSC will further lead to an influence on the sending of MMS messages. For instance, it can be appreciated from FIG. 1 that the processing on a mobile newspaper is limited in time, the concentrated sending of a mobile morning paper and a mobile evening paper will degrade the processing performance of the MMSC, and this degradation will further disable the timely transmission of the mobile newspaper to the user terminal and consequently lower the customer satisfaction.